Scott Horton (3:33)

Hey, Dave, thanks for having me.

Dave Smith (3:35)

Of course.

Scott Horton (3:35)

Yeah, I'm doing like my, I hope, final read through right now. And then it's the very last of the technical. I still got to do page numbers and chapter headings and table of contents and all that. Forget the index, just buy the Kindle version and look it up that way if you want. But then, yeah, the plan, I always say two weeks. I'm like, you ever see Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in the Money Pit? Two weeks, that's me in the book. But I'm really going for that. And in fact, I've been so bold as to put up a pre order page@provokedbook.com or Scott Horton.org provoked it'll forward you onto there. And so we're taking pre orders now because I got this show and I got Tom woods and some other things, you know, this week. So I figure I might as well go ahead and get that started. And then that's, you know, like the kids throwing their hat over the fence. Now you gotta go climb it. So I'm gonna have to pull the trigger on this thing very relatively soon now. So I'm really hoping it'll be two weeks. And then it's the story of everything that Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, Bush Jr, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and John McCain and Hillary Clinton did to ruin America's relationship with Russia after the end of the last Cold War and to start the new Cold War and of course, the catastrophe in Ukraine, as the subtitle says there. So that's the book. And it's, as they say, comprehensive.

Dave Smith (5:06)

Yeah, it sure is that you think.

Scott Horton (5:09)

But it's got, Look, I got. Not as long as we're talking about it. I got all the NATO promises and NATO expansion. I got shock therapy and all of the color coded of the Balkan wars, the color coded revolutions and including the Maidan Revolution of 2014. And then a lot of the backstory, the history of the different conflicts over Crimea and, you know, different parts of Ukraine, the history of the world wars and all that going back. And then I have a whole section on russiagate and Trump years there, of course, and then on the war itself and where we are now. And so that's what took so long. But every attempted and failed coup in Belarus is in there, all of them, everything. So that's what people are looking for, is the full story. That's the full story from Bush Senior all the way through today.

Dave Smith (6:00)

I was, I was talking about the book with a mutual friend of ours and I said at one point, I said, it's as if Scott's prosecuting the case against the regime for how this whole situation, you know, is all their fault.

Scott Horton (6:15)

Yeah.

Dave Smith (6:15)

And. But it feels like it's like the process, the prosecutor's case is so airtight that like halfway through the book, you could see the regime just stand up in court and be like, we just. We'd like to change our, our. Like, do we have to? All right, fine. And, and it really is, it's very satisfying for someone like me who's been out in the world kind of arguing about this over the last few years to just be. Because it's so thorough and comprehensive and it's just like, come on, man, like, look at this in black and white. And me, that this wasn't like that. We didn't at every single inch pursue the most aggressive, hostile policy toward Russia constantly. You know, it's like the whole book is, as you've been talking about for the last few years, just, you see, see all of the different off ramps, all of the off ramps where it didn't have to end here. It could have ended in so many different places. There could. It's not even like, even after doing everything wrong through the 90s and everything wrong through the first 10 years of the 21st century, there were still opportunity after opportunity, and instead at every turn they were like, nope, we're driving toward conflict. We're not getting off here on peace Boulevard Conflict is right ahead. Let's keep driving forward. So anyway, I just, I'm very excited for. For everybody to read it. And the next time we have you on this show, it will be because the book is out and we're spending an episode promoting that.

Scott Horton (7:42)

Hey, let me say real quick two things. One of them is part of the good part of being so old is that I've been messing with anti war.com for 20 years now. A little more. And so ever since the Orange Revolution back then. And so and, and working with Justin Raimondo and all the guests on the show and we really call this this whole time for 20 years. As, you know, just like in moving into Iraq in 2003, it's like the slowest motion train wreck of things that did not have to happen. You can go find. And that's how I know so much about it is because I've been covering it this whole time. And then the other thing is, I hope people aren't too intimidated by the size of the book because almost half of that is footnotes. It's literally hundreds of pages worth of footnotes. Six thousand foot. Well, more than 6,000 footnotes, 7,000 citations, because a lot of footnotes have more than one citation. So there are some pages where there's more citations on the page than there are space of paragraphs of prose. So that's showing my work and hopefully proving that I'm a reliable narrator, but also giving you guys the opportunity to follow up and see whether all these footnotes say what I say they say by steering you toward. And I have them all right there at the bottom of the page so that you can check my work as you're reading. So that's how I like it. So that's how I did it. And so that's part of why it's like that is because the overkill on the citations there. But I hope that's useful for people.

Dave Smith (9:09)

To, you know, 100%. And also, like, you know, if you live in a blue state where you're not allowed to have guns and someone breaks into your house at the middle of the night, now you got something to whack him over the head with. So it's all. He's doing a lot for you, you're not going to survive too many of those heads.

Scott Horton (9:23)

Seriously. Or like, if you're real short and you got to give a speech, you just behind the podium, you know, So.

Dave Smith (9:30)

I wanted the reason I wanted to have you on today, which obviously, of course, you're our great foreign policy expert. But I wanted to talk about something more broadly. So I had Michael Malice on the show recently, and then I just went on Tom Wood's show. And of course, I've done a bunch of episodes about the election. A lot of libertarians are supporting Trump in it. I've kind of been been beaten down to saying that I also am going to vote for Donald Trump. There's a lot of drama about the Libertarian Party, and I just kind of felt like I think my audience should also hear from you about this stuff before the election, as you're kind of one of the pillars in this, this movement. So you can, you could start almost wherever you want to with this. But what are, what are Scott Horton's thoughts on the 2024 election, which really has been a wild one and, and different in so many ways than any election I've ever seen. What do you think about all this?

Scott Horton (10:34)

Well, mostly I regret that I've been writing a book. I always do this. This happened in 2016 and in 2020 as well. I want to cover the election all year long on my radio show. And now I'm hardly a radio show at all. I'm an author. It sucks. I'm going back to being a radio show as soon as possible because I about this kind of stuff, you know, of course, it's hugely important. And, you know, in my, I don't know, you might be too young for this, but when Futurama first came out, they had Robert Johnson versus John Robertson, and they're like, running against each other for president and like this going, I think your 3% capital gains increase is too extreme. And he's going, I think it's not too extreme enough. And then like, that's it. Push versus Gore. You know, this is not quite like that. Right. It's a bit different than that. I mean, the parties, I mean, if we're talking McConnell and Schumer, then yes, right. We still live in their world. But as far as, like, who's the figurehead sitting in the chair behind the desk, actually? And look, I know I just said figurehead, and a lot of people say that. And there is, I'm on a show here. But, you know, the president in the United States has a lot of power, a lot. And, and you can see, especially with Donald Trump, where he's willing to do things on a whim, it does matter who's sitting at that desk. And you have, I mean, what can you say? You got Donald Trump, who's a caricature of his own self, Versus Kamala Harris, who is the emptiest suit anyone has ever seen. And the polls say that they're neck and neck. You know, I don't know. I can, I try very hard to put myself in as many other shoes as I can and not just see the world through my own stupid eyes. I'm very biased in all of my very biased ways. I try very hard to believe that people believe in her. And I can see how on the margin there's got to be some. But, and, and, and I can see why people just, they never liked Trump and now they even more don't like him. Maybe even if they, if they already lean left, maybe they've been just completely hooked into the hysteria about his danger of what he represents is, you know, America will never be America again after this because he's going to turn it into Nazi Stan or whatever thing. You know, I could see people voting for her out of fear of him or even, I think this is a big part of how he lost the last election. He should have won it by 50 points, as Hillary would say, or whatever. But it was just people were exhausted and half of it wasn't his fault. Half of it was the false accusations against him, but half of it was his fault that like just all day long it's Trumpian antics and people are just don't want to have to care about what the President's doing and saying every single day of their life the way it is under him, where it's constantly the Trump show, you know. So I think there could be, maybe people just want to not have to live that way again or whatever. And would see her, she's. Is she basically running as Joe Biden? Right. Like, everybody knows that he is essentially not there. It's rule by committee and that you can trust that it's basically the same committee is going to be around her, helping to, you know, carry her along or whatever. And so if you like this, then keep with this same safe, stayed, status quo kind of thing compared to whatever Trump represents, it's going to be disruptive. You know, if you like it, then good, but if you don't, then, you know, maybe people. I could see, I'm trying, you can see why I'm rationalizing here how people could try, you know, in their mind to figure how she could be the better choice. Just like the last two elections, I will be rooting for Trump. I cannot vote for the man. There's just, he is so far over the line on so many things. But then again, too, like I Gotta tell you, Dave, every time they lie, I move a click to the right. And it's every day, like right now, I'm like somewhere between Suharto and Genghis Khan, right? Like, I'm like, I, I, I want to throw a communist off of something or something. I'm, I'm upset. I mean, when they told me. And look, I mean it happens every day, right? The latest one is that Trump said that Liz Cheney should be executed when he was just calling her a chicken hawk. He said, give her a rifle and put her out. That's not a firing squad. What? Don't lie. I don't like it when you lie to me kind of thing. And then they told me and I met this guy because I was piling around with you. I met Tony Hinchcliffe. I seen him on the TV there when he was making fun of the football man. And I know that he's not just a comedian, he's a Don Rickles guy. He's a guy that goes, haha, your wife left you and whatever, you're black, blah, blah. He's a comedian, he's an insult comic. Right. Those are not exact quotes of him. I was. But that's the joke. And forgive me, Tony Hinchcliffe, for saying this, but just for people who don't understand, who maybe are coming from a different perspective on this, it's sorta like Sarah Silverman. The joke is that she would dare say such a thing or that she's in, she's playing a character who would be so tone deaf to say such a horrible deal or whatever. That's the joke. And so you can pretend to not get it, but you're just pretending it's still a joke. But I met this guy and then I got to read in the New York Times that Tony Hinchcliffe is a man who made remarks that hurt people's feelings and were racially insensitive and this and that, like, I'm sorry, that's like an H bomb goes off in my head when you lie. And I'll tell you why too. It's because of my tiny, fragile, childish little ego. I don't like being called stupid like that. And when you're telling me that I'm so stupid that I'm going to believe you, that Tony Hinchcliffe is a man and not an insult comic who told an insulting joke because that's his thing, then like, yeah, that makes me want to vote for Trump three times just to spite them. Somebody was just playing me a clip. Oh no, I Saw it in the margin at town hall. Of course, everybody films their every interaction out in public with strangers now, right? And so it's a black Trump voter being lectured by a white Kamala Harris voter, liberal woman who's like the most hectoring, you know, Hillary Clintonite, NPR Prius, driving lady hectoring this black woman that, oh, how could you vote for Trump? And all of this thing. And it's like, man, just. I do. I hate liberal white women so much right now, and other liberal women, too, I guess, but mostly the white ones. I don't know why. They're just the more obnoxious to me and the more condescending. And I could see maybe voting for an Israeli spy like Donald Trump for president, if just the collateral damage would be that these women would cry for the next four years and bankrupt their husbands, their weak, pathetic husbands, that they must be on therapy bills for all their panic disorders and all of their things. I just. I want them to be miserable. I hate them. I hate them. Dude, the women who all believed Russiagate, right? Like, these are the women who was. I'm totally ripping someone else, probably. Oh, I know what it was. I was watching this great YouTube about the MeToo movement and how it was totally crazy and all these innocent people got hurt, whatever. And he was like, yeah, it's like the Salem witch trials, which was at least initially led by women, right? Like, they're the worst kinds of truthers when they all get in a gaggle on the View and decide that they know what's going on in the world. And Vladimir Putin has inflicted this New York real estate tycoon on us somehow, everyone. And, like, it's the dumbest crap that they took. Talk themselves into believing. And right now they think that Donald Trump is a white supremacist Nazi Hitler who wants to enslave them and put them all in concentration camps. And they sound like Alex Jones in 1997. Bill Clinton's going to suspend the Constitution and put us all in camps. That's what all the liberals at the New Republic and the Atlantic and CNN and MSNBC sound like right now. And the View and Whoopi Goldberg and all the women who believe them and. Okay, good. I want them to be that afraid. Like, I know that that's not going to happen, but I want them to wallow in the fear caused by the depths of their stupidity and depravity, in their willingness to go along with power. Like, and it's not just because they ruined Star Wars. And that is part of it. They did ruin Star wars and that's really bad. But also, you know.

Dave Smith (19:31)

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Scott Horton (21:23)

Everything that the Democrats have done, it's all cumulative to me, you know, but it's the day to day lies that just drive me out of my mind. I just can't stand it. Oh, Donald Trump. I says to my wife, who she's not watching the news much lately, but she used to live in New York City, you know, she's one of the Jews who didn't show up at the World Trade center that day, Dave, because she was sick, not because she was warned. But anyway, I says to her, I says, hey honey, what's the most important entertainment venue in New York City? And she goes, well, Madison Square Garden, of course. Like, yeah, hey, has anybody held any events there since 1939? She's like, yeah, everybody. What are we talking about? I think Adam Yalk was up there singing. She's crafty, you know, in 1986. What are we talking about here? And then. And the only parallel they have, the only parallel is Madison Square Garden rally. That's it. And I'm supposed to swallow this whole that Trump. And they don't even pretend to say why you should believe that Trump held this rally at Madison Square Garden as some sort of homage to these Nazis and as his secret code to all. Every single person on the right in America who are all secret Hitler lovers, even though our fathers all fought the Nazis in the second or our grandfathers fought the Nazis in the second World War. But. But anyway, no, that kind of thing, man. It's just, again, it's my fragile, pathetic little ego. I can't stand being told that I'm stupid enough to believe that. I just can't stand it, you know? And again, I want to make the people who are stupid enough to believe it, I want them to be that fearful and miserable because f them.

Dave Smith (23:12)

Yeah. Well, especially it's interesting from like, the radical libertarian point of view, because, you know, we kind of live in this world where we're like, okay, first of all, you're all Nazis.

Scott Horton (23:24)

Yeah, Right.

Dave Smith (23:25)

You know what I mean?

Scott Horton (23:27)

They're all fascists.

Dave Smith (23:28)

Yeah. Well, it reminds me, I was getting into this argument with this corner of right wing Twitter that was. So basically, there's a bunch of right wingers on Twitter who are in love with calling Kamala Harris a communist. And when I was on Tucker Carlson show last time, I was talking about how stupid this talking point is from Donald Trump, I was like, calling Kamala Harris a communist is like, I don't know, it sounds to everyone who's not 80 like something their grandpa would say. And also, like, what do you really mean? I mean, she's not a Marxist. She's a tool for big business. This isn't, you know, like, our. Our economy that's run by big banks and big pharmaceutical companies and big weapons companies aren't about to nationalize the means of production. Like, this is all stuff. But anyway, so I got in this argument with a few right wingers who want or like, no, no, no. And let me give you the argument for why she is a communist. And it is the same thing where you're like, okay, first off, I know this stuff better than you. And if there's any argument that she's A Communist, fine. But then they're all communists. Like this. It still doesn't just apply to her. Then you're not, you're not defeating the communists by voting for Marco Rubio or something, dude. Like, they're all that. You know what I mean? So it's like, whatever. If you actually want, if anyone wanted to have an interesting conversation about, like, the evils of fascism or even Nazism, it's like, okay, then we could talk about the similarities that our regime has with those regimes, or we could talk about all of the Nazis that were absorbed into the United States of America after the Second World War. Like, there's a lot of really interesting topics there. But of course they want to have the dumbest conversation. The only other thing I will say also is that, that I didn't. I saw the news reports about Donald Trump threatening or, you know, wishing violence on Liz Cheney before I saw his clip. And my first thought when I saw the news reports was like, I'm already voting for the guy. Yeah, I can't vote for him anymore. I could try. I could go back and try to vote for him again. But anyway, that's.

Scott Horton (25:29)

Yeah. Cindy Sheehan. Cindy Sheehan put out a thing that said, oh, Orange man bad promises to execute lizard Cheney. Fine, I'll vote for him. You're finally convinced Cindy Sheehan to turn out to vote Republican, Guys.

Dave Smith (25:46)

Oh, yeah, it's all. Well, look, it's. I will say. And maybe you. I don't know if you feel the same way.

Scott Horton (25:52)

Oh, wait, I was going to make a joke about.

Dave Smith (25:53)

Go ahead.

Scott Horton (25:54)

The thing where, oh, one general told Jeffrey Goldberg that Trump said Hitler did a lot of good things in the beginning, and they're all having a big fit about that. But it's like all of the things that Hitler did in the beginning are all things that you love. Giant infrastructure projects, inflationary money, war. You know, all of it. The Hitlerian program, basically, other than the black leather and the marching up and down. This is you guys. You kill millions of people all the time.

Dave Smith (26:27)

Everyone knows it, down to the architecture. You love all of it. You love the whole thing. Go look at Washington D.C. man. They love every inch of it. Like you said, maybe not giant flags. Yeah, Maybe not. Maybe not the uniforms and maybe not the seizing of Jewish businesses. But other than that, if you're talking before, like, the war, they love everything.

Scott Horton (26:47)

Fascism with American characteristics, dude, we call it the New Deal, you know, well, actually.

Dave Smith (26:53)

And whatever. It's interesting chapter in history, but, you know, the Nazis borrowed quite a bit from the progressives, like they were keeping their eyes on the progressive movement in America.

Scott Horton (27:02)

And in fact, that's where the eugenics stuff comes from.

Dave Smith (27:05)

Yes, yes.

Scott Horton (27:06)

Hey, the Klan were leaders of the cleanup government, man. There's way too much corruption in government. The Ku Klux Klan is here to end this patronage system.

Dave Smith (27:14)

You know, they actually, they. I remember reading about this years ago. I'd have to go back and find where I read this. But the Nazis, when they first were coming to power, they first won the big. They won like a bunch of seats. And I want to say it was in 30. In 1930, they had elections in Germany and it was like the first successful, like Nazi party actually got some seats in there. And one of the things they were talking about with how to deal with the Jewish problem was like, what the standard for. How do you, how do you decide someone's Jewish? You know, you got a whole lot of mixed people is Germany was not a primitive ancient society. You know what I mean? And they, they considered the Southern Democrats one drop rule of how you can sit what you consider. And then they rejected that as just being too extreme. And so they were ultimately like. And then they settled on, I think it was like two grandparents. If you had two grandparents who were Jewish, you were considered Jewish. But it is just kind of a funny little note of history that even they were kind of like, well, I mean, when you're actually implementing this, we'd need some type of system to determine. And they were like, I don't know, these Southern Democrats are a bit extreme with their one drop policy. I mean, come on.

Scott Horton (28:29)

You know John Taylor Gatto, I'm sure you've read him, right, about the origins of American education. He wrote about how when the Nazis would forcibly sterilize a woman, they called it the Indiana procedure because that's who they were copying with that, you know. So.

Dave Smith (28:44)

Yeah, anyways, anyway, there's a lot of embarrassing history there. Yeah. So I will say there's obviously look. To say that Donald Trump has his flaws is an understatement. And there's lots of policies where he has just been kind of unforgivable. And I certainly, as I said on Tom's show the other day, I mean, if there's any libertarian who were to say to me, know, I just cannot vote for a president who supported lockdowns, or I cannot vote for a president who, who backed the Saudis war in Yemen or, or whatever his rhetoric on Israel or any of that stuff, I can't really argue with you. I go, yeah, It's. He's awful on those things. I understand. We are in kind of a weird, unique situation, though, both with, I think, how awful the Kamala Harris campaign is and not just. It's not that she's so uniquely awful. I mean, I'm not going to say she's more evil than John McCain. You know, Republicans have run some bad candidates. I'm not going to say she's more evil than, than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. There is does seem to be something different, though, about the Kamala Harris campaign, where you're actually unlike all of those guys you're running there. First of all, the sitting president was essentially cooed out of his reelection campaign. I mean, obviously he's senile and in no position to be President of the United States, but that's what the 25th Amendment's for. You know, like, you could invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him. You can't do whatever the hell they just did, which, you know, we could get into, but. And then she's running on just literally, as you said, like nothing. Essentially, I'm nothing. And embrace implicitly I'm government. Government by committee will continue, I guess, but explicitly, it's like, I'm just going to tell you that I grew up in a middle class, you know, like, I have nothing else to say. And it does, you know, particularly at a time where we've kind of seen what the machine wants to do over the last few years and what they'll continue to do. There's not much benefit to that. And it does seem like Donald Trump, at least in this, at least in this election cycle, has made some attempts to throw some promises, throw some red meat out to people who are concerned with the type of stuff that we're concerned with. So, like, I don't know, what, what do you think of all that?

Scott Horton (31:24)

Well, you know, I believe it when I see it. I mean, the big one that everybody's really excited about is the promise that Ron Paul could get some kind of position helping Elon Musk fire people in close departments and stuff like this. But the fact of the matter is you need real consensus in the country. You're going to close departments down. I just don't think they're going to do that. And man, my whole life I've heard politicians run against waste, fraud and abuse. What they mean by that is they're going to cut.00001% from nothing, fire the janitor, the one guy in the building they needed, you know, and keep everybody else. I Don't take that seriously at all. You want to, you know, end waste, fraud and abuse, abolish the central bank, Close down entirely, the Commerce Department, the Department of education, the IRS, the ATF, at least 2/3 of the FBI. I'm being generous today. Right. If we're going to talk about Ron Paul and downsizing government in any serious sense, then we're talking about questioning the post New Deal, Post World War II consensus on the role of the national government in our society. Does anybody really think that that's happening? Come on. And I love Angela McArdle, and she may be right. Who knows, you know, exactly what influence she might have. You know, But I was, like, complaining. I was on a show with her yesterday, says, you know, Miriam Adelson wrote Trump a check for $100 million. And she's like, yeah, well, I'm talking with their people all the time, says, did you write him a check for a hundred million dollars? And so, like, yeah, the libertarians, if you're Donald Trump, did the libertarians need to be patted on the head and placated somehow? You're going to free their one guy from jail, maybe, or whatever. That'd be great if they did. And, I mean, that'd be everything to Ross and to his mother. You know what I mean? So, like, I'm not trying to sell that short, but, like, I'm not one to take bribes well, either. I mean, the thing is, the very worst thing about Trump is what an Israeli chump he is. But even though everything that's happened in Palestine for the last year is all his fault, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the ones who gave Benjamin Netanyahu all those bombs and sanctified this and armed it. They gave him $23 billion worth of weapons and aid extra in the last year to slaughter these poor people. And Trump didn't do that. He might well have. He might have told Netanyahu, look, just kill them all and finish the project once and for all. I don't know. And he still might. Yeah, I don't know. Any reason why Donald Trump wouldn't just tell Netanyahu, do whatever you want. I don't care. And then who's going to stop him then? The eu and as they always say, well, ask for forgiveness later instead of permission first. So it wouldn't be that hard for the Israelis to start, you know, heavy shelling of the major cities of the west bank and try to cleanse those people and force them into Jordan, at least millions of them. There's 3 million there, kick out two out of three or whatever. Would Netanyahu go that far? Sure, if the US President would let him. And does Donald Trump know any reason why in the world he shouldn't just let Netanyahu, as he said, quote, quote, finish the job is what he told Netanyahu the other day. Well, what do you mean by that? How about, well, we finished cleansing all of historic Palestine and we'll call it Greater Israel. How about that for finish the job? And what does Donald Trump really care? His son in law. And I guess people don't know this, seems like they should talk about this every day, all the time. His son in law, Jared Kushner, you know, the guy who was in charge of his entire Middle east policy for four years, is Benjamin Netanyahu's godson the whole time. When he was a young boy growing up in New York City, when Benjamin Netanyahu would come to town, he had to sleep on the couch because Benjamin Netanyahu would sleep in his bed. Google that. Okay? That's who Jared Kushner is. He's an Israeli agent, He's an Israeli sayonim. He's here to represent the interests of a foreign power. And he's got Donald Trump completely pwned like the gimp in the box on Pulp Fiction poned. So Donald Trump can dress up like Pat Buchanan all he wants. He's not Pat Buchanan. He's a Zionist. And when you're a Zionist, you can't be America first.

Dave Smith (36:02)

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Scott Horton (38:04)

Compromised, man.

Dave Smith (38:06)

It's so amazing to see someone run an America first campaign with his position on Israel. I mean it's just not. It's just the two things are as, you know. I don't know, it's like, it's like I'm running an anti racism campaign, but I am for slavery. Yeah.

Scott Horton (38:26)

Hey, by the way, so a lot of people are listening to this. I should explain what I mean, but I'll do it real quick here.

Dave Smith (38:31)

Sure.

Scott Horton (38:31)

What he did was when he was president before was one he quote unquote recognized as though he has any authority whatsoever to recognize Israel's seizure of Syria's Golan Heights, which they stole in 67 and officially annexed in 1981, but that no one else ever recognized until him and his story told the story about it. I told him, tell me about the Golan Heights for five minutes. And after a couple minutes I interrupted, said fine, you can have it. In other words, he didn't know anything about it. He never even heard the word Drews before. He doesn't know whose property that is or where they're from or what the Israelis want. The land, it's high ground, huh? And you need it. You say, okay, fine, it's yours. He said for money. For money that they gave to him, you know, to his family, to his son in law. Then they rigged these Abraham Accords and everybody says, oh, this is his great victory. But what this is is it's engineering the final sellout of the Palestinians that they'll never get independence and they'll never get citizenship. They will be the lowest caste Indians on a reservation forever. And that no one's ever coming for you again. And not that any of these countries ever promised to come for them and really help them, but just they promised never to normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians got their fair shape.

Dave Smith (39:47)

And that's always been the hope. Right. Like the hope from the Palestinians from the very beginning has always been that the surrounding Arab nations with their populations who are like 100% on the Palestinian side of this, that they would someday come to their rescue because, you know, politically. Well, right.

Scott Horton (40:06)

They actually like, maybe militaries.

Dave Smith (40:08)

Yes.

Scott Horton (40:08)

Yeah, yeah. It could just be. Yeah. The nations of the region are just never going to normalize relations with you until you do the right thing. Like it shouldn't have to be any harder than that. Right. The Saudis put out a great peace plan back in oh, two.

Dave Smith (40:21)

Right.

Scott Horton (40:21)

Colin Powell was for it, you know, so, but, so that was part of it. Right. Not necessarily that anyone's really coming for you literally, but like, maybe they'll pressure the government of Israel to finally give in and do the right thing here, you know. And so this was the final sellout of them by Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and UAE by normalizing. And then they were working on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations and telling the Palestinians, you're screwed, you get nothing. And that was Netanyahu's big speech at the UN at the end of September 23, bragging that he got away with it all. And then it was just three weeks later that the October 7th riot happened where they broke out of their cage and said, no, the status quo will not hold. And instead we got this. And then this was the reaction that they provoked is something, you know, approximating. I mean, I'm not up to date really. You gotta ask the guys from antiwar.com but there's, you know, major operations and apparently a renewed cleansing campaign going on in north Gaza now where they're going to cleanse at least major portions of it more than before. And, you know, I don't know. I know that someday they'd like to own all of southern Lebanon up to the Litany river, if they can. Going back to Jabotinsky, you know, Greater Israel, they mean it. You know, the eastern border, be the Euphrates river, all the way to Kuwait if they can have their way. And the American people can't afford it, Dave. So I don't know why not, you know, but look, so. And then he also recognized, he moved the embassy to Jerusalem and this is something that Clinton and W. Bush have promised to do. I don't think Barack Obama ever said he would, but Clinton and Bush have both promised to do this. But the idea was, yeah, yeah, yeah, someday, someday, but never do it. Because it's really important symbolism. Because the Israelis have, the way they put in their slogan is, this is the eternal, indivisible, united capital of Israel forever and ever and ever. And then. But so if that's true, and it has the American stamp of approval on it, then that means that East Jerusalem will not be the capital of a Palestinian state, which was always the plan if they were ever going to have their independent state. So it's not just like, oh, boohoo, I care which street your embassy is on. The point is that by moving it from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, America was ratifying the Israeli's claim to the entire city, including the Eastern hat. And which of course means severely implies the further cleansing of the Palestinian Muslims and Christians that still live in East Jerusalem and eventually the seizure of the last of their holy sites. And if the Israelis blow up the Al Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple there, then we're going to have a world war. And that's what's at stake there. And Donald Trump goes, oh, you want East Jerusalem, huh? You want me to move the embassy? Gee, Sheldon Adelson gave me a bunch of money and gee, he's a casino guy that I always really respected for being bigger and better in the casino business than me. I guess if he says I should move the embassy there and he gave me a bunch of money, then sure. And so he did. And so it goes to show that one, he doesn't know anything about it. He doesn't give a damn about the Palestinians whatsoever. And he can be bribed with simple green dollars even though he's already in his late 70s and his grandkids are already set for life and he's already been the president damn United States of America before. And the idea that he's going to get in there and say, oh, Miriam Adelson, I'm not really your friend, I'm not really fond of you, and I don't really appreciate the hundreds of millions of dollars you and your husband have given me. And now you can go screw yourself, lady, because now I'm George Washington and I'm going to put America first. And Israel can go suck up to Russia if you don't like it. Yeah, right, he's going to do that. And then if he doesn't do that well, what's. Never mind the opposite of that. What's. Just short of that, he's W. Bush for another four years. That's what.

Dave Smith (44:17)

Yeah, well, certainly when it comes to relations with Israel, I mean, how about worse? Yeah, yeah. Well, look, I mean, there's. Like you said, I mean, he did go a step further than even W. Was willing to do. You. Where there is a stronger case for Donald Trump is on the topic that, of course, you're writing. You're just finishing this book on where there does seem to be, at least rhetorically. And of course, you can get into. It's in the book, and I highly recommend people read it. Donald Trump's track record on Ukraine is not good, and his track record with Russia is not good. However, there. There does seem to be, at least at times, sometimes a meaningful difference in the rhetoric between the Biden administration and Donald Trump the entire campaign. And since, well before he was subbed out for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump has been saying some, actually pretty great things. Now, he'll go back and forth. At one point, he'll say, I just want the killing to stop. I could negotiate an end to this in a day. The war will be over if I'm in there. And then at other points, he'll start talking about how Europe isn't paying their fair share or something like that, which doesn't, you know, it's kind of this slippery thing where you're like, wait a minute, I liked that last guy. What's this guy talking about? Like, our. Our beef here isn't just getting some additional funding from the other European countries. However, it's hard to ignore that he does seem. He does his from day one, despite all of the Russiagate nonsense, which is also in the book.

Scott Horton (45:53)

Look, yes, it is.

Dave Smith (45:56)

There's Donald Trump's attitude toward Russia and certainly the way he's talked about this war over the last year or two, it's hard to argue that it's not light years better than where the Democrats are at.

Scott Horton (46:12)

Sure. Yeah. And he ain't Ron Paul. So he says things like, well, look, if Putin doesn't do what I want, well, I'll massively increase arms to Ukraine and I'll force them, you know, whatever. That's the only way you can think about it, you know, is so. And look, whatever. You could just say, yeah, he has to say tough guy stuff. That's how you close the deal. But I think, you know, he surely does not want the war. And I think it is probably true that the war would not have happened if he was there, you know, he says that about Hamas, like, oh, they would just would have been too scared of him to fight back or something like that. But when he says that about Ukraine, I think it's more realistic because I think just he had a, any kind of better relationship compared to Joe Biden, who's just absolutely hated Putin for, you know, since at least the late Bush years, since at least like 0708. I'm not sure exactly when Biden turned on Putin. He liked him for a little while there, but maybe even by like05 when he went after Yukos Khodorkovsky. But he, you know, insulted Putin to his face in 2011 in Russia. And, you know, he. So there's just that enmity there between them. And then also, and I think this must be a big part of it, that Putin saw Biden's weakness. He just saw that like, I'm going to be able to do this and didn't think that Biden would be able to do anything to stop him. And then probably he was reaffirmed in that thinking watching the fall of Afghanistan and how indecisive Biden was in finishing out the withdrawal there, not withdrawing at all, but just botching it the way he did. And you know, the Bob Woodward book, the new Bob Woodward book has quotes from the high level intelligence officials saying that they assessed that, that they even claimed, I think to have sources in Russia saying this was part of their thinking was that Afghanistan made Biden look so weak that they thought, yeah, we could definitely press our advantage now. But the problem is you got to throw out that whole Bob Woodward book because he's got a big fake quote of Sergei lavrov on page 88. And then the whole book, the whole point of a Bob Woodward book is he has quotes from people that nobody else can talk to, but he gets interviews with. But so if he's lying about a quote that I can check on the OSCE website, then what is he saying when he's quoting Blinken and Sullivan and the rest of these people? Like, if they don't dispute all the quotes, then I'm supposed to accept them or something. I don't know. I just can't. I started to write a note in my book because I had actually, you know what, man? In that book there's all kinds of quotes of Biden saying how right I am about everything. Like I started quoting some good stuff in there and Avril Haynes, the dni, I had them admitting, oh yeah, Horton's right. After all Blah, blah, all over the place. And I had to cut all those quotes out. Once I got to the part where Woodward's lying to me, I started to write in the footnotes, well, you got to kind of take these with a grain of salt. And I'm like, I can't put quotes that you got to take with a grain of salt in the book. We're like, I'm already, I got a disclaimer, even though he is the most prominent journalist in America, but like, he just happened to have a quote in there. I, and I happen to be writing a book about this. I have the Lavrov quote already. I know what he said. So when I read the live version of it, I'm like, hey, I know that quote. And that's not right. And so it's, it's page 88 if anybody wants to check this out. And also Amazon removed my review about this, saying that I claimed I got an inauthentic copy of the book. That's not what I said. I said there's a fake quote on page 88. So I had a great one star review on there and they took it down and there's now all the one star reviews are, my book was torn or whatever, and no criticism of the actual substance of the thing. But if anyone wants to check the quote is the Playing with Fire quote of lavrov on page 88. If anybody, I'm not selling it. If anybody already has the new Woodward book. And then go and check the OSCE websites from December, I'm pretty sure December 2, 2021, but certainly December 2021, and you'll find the quote from Sergey Lavrov playing with Fire. And you'll see how Bob Woodward turns the meaning of the quote entirely upside down to he's saying, essentially, it's so reckless the way you guys completely disregard our opinion about your expansion of the NATO alliance. And then they turn, he butchers the quote into saying Lavrov is saying that America has no right to decide who should be in its alliance or not, which of course makes no sense whatsoever because that's not what he said. The whole thing is stupid. But anyway, point just being, you can't trust Bob Woodward to tell you a quote, right? Not when Google's right there and you can check him. So it sucks because there are a bunch of quotes in there. Biden going, yeah, it's NATO expansion has really got Putin paranoid. That guy is so paranoid about NATO expansion, Dave. And like, yeah, I guess I can't have that in the book after all, then. Thanks a lot, Bob. Jerk.

Dave Smith (51:17)

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Scott Horton (54:27)

Yeah, no, you're right. And look, this is really the most important issue in the world. Israel, Palestine is one that really gets under my skin because I'm still carrying a grudge from that time that Israel lied us into Iraq War two and Syria, for that matter.

Dave Smith (54:44)

Yeah, well, and it's also the worst thing happening in the world. And it's the worst thing. And I just say that because I, like, I don't know exactly how you measure all these different conflicts, but just the number of kids dying, the number of kids dying alone just makes it the worst thing in the world.

Scott Horton (54:59)

I mean. Yeah, because the difference there is in Ukraine, it's almost entirely combatants fighting combatants. And there are missile strikes that hit cities and this kind of thing, some infrastructure stuff. But mostly the civilians have fled where the fighting is taking place. And it's conscripts fighting conscripts, which is still a horror show to me. They're like just half a degree removed from being a civilian. You know, they're an enslaved combatant. So they're fair game, but only unfair game, really. But that's not the same as the slaughter in Gaza. On the other hand, the Ukraine war has the potential to turn into the worst thing, far beyond anything that anyone could imagine, and a real potential. And when we talked about this a couple years ago, I says to you, I says, this is an emergency. We got a war on Russia's border. But, Dave, right now, we got a war inside Russia. And since the end of August, the Ukrainians took a couple hundred square miles of Kursk Oblast there, that's what they called province. And the Russians have taken about half of it back by now. But, you know, we're. This is like counting on the cool, patient wisdom of George W. Bush to see you through. Right. Like Vladimir Putin. We're benefiting right now from the fact that this guy is such a sociopath that he's like, oh, they invaded Kursk huh? Well, kill them as soon as you can. And apparently doesn't get all upset. Because, man, what if he got all upset? That guy Dimitri Medvedev, that replaced him for a little while, that guy gets upset. You know what I mean? This guy Putin is like, oh, well, we'll have to make sure that they all die horribly or whatever. But it's just business to him. He doesn't even give a damn when they invade Kursk. Apparently he doesn't, like, react in any way other than standing orders apply. Kill them till they're dead. Drive them out of the thing. He already incorporated four provinces of Ukraine into Russia officially. So I guess in his mind, Kursk isn't any different than Luhansk or Donetsk at this point. I don't know. But, man, okay, so if he had a bad day, we could have a nuclear war over just that, right? I mean, Moscow is only 2, 300 miles from Kharkiv anyway. We're talking spitting distance here to the capital city. And I'm not saying that there was no reason for them to perceive a threat to the Capitol, really, but still, like, I don't know, we're supposed to just accept that the meanest, craziest, most tyrannical psychopath killer on the planet, other than Benjamin Netanyahu, I guess, is going to just always be completely stable and reliable and predictable and not do anything that we would not expect him to do and not go too far. And meanwhile, and as I show in the book, there's endless citations of these Americans, especially Democrats, going, well, he hasn't nuked us yet. They said we shouldn't give him these kinds of weapons because maybe Russia would nuke them. But then we gave him those kinds of weapons, and he didn't nuke them. We gave him tanks. He still didn't use nukes. We started hitting targets in Crimea. He still didn't use nukes. In fact, in the Wall Street Journal, I had a thing where I'm pretty sure it was the Journal where the Biden administration is talking about, you know, maybe the lesson of the Kursk invasion is we've been way too squeamish about what the Russians will put up with, and maybe we can have a conventional war with Russia without it turning into a nuclear war, and they're just brave and getting braver. Where. And this is the riddle of the nukes that people maybe don't understand or hadn't thought about or nobody explained yet. But maybe I'm wrong about this. I know a nuclear war expert who says that I'm wrong about this, but I know other ones who say I'm not. And all the war games that I know of going back say that once you start a nuclear war with Russia, then it's on because it's use them or lose them. If we don't hit, if we don't launch everything we got from our silos, they're going to nuke our nukes in their silos and we'll lose them. So we might as well go ahead and launch everything we've got. And so essentially, once anybody starts tossing around even lower scale, what they call usable tactical atom bombs, Hiroshima, Nagasaki sized bombs, or even smaller than that, that within a day or two, it turns into general thermonuclear war and everybody loses all their military bases in all their capital cities, a thousand targets in Russia and a thousand targets in the United States, and it's the end of civilization and a World War II worth a dead in 45 minutes. And that's just the start. And that's what a nuclear war would look like it'd be. You know, imagine a couple of H bombs going off over the five boroughs. Nobody ever lived there again. And even, not to be crude about it, but just separate argument, forget the people. How about everything at every museum in New York lost to humanity forever? How about just the value of that? How about just the value of all the written works at all those publishing houses? Lose Washington D.C. and lose the Library of Congress, like the Library of Alexandria, where humanity that does survive in the future loses all of that. Not just financial, but human capital, the investments that we've made in our own civilization over the last last few thousand years, gone in a week, gone in a day or two. That can really happen. And they act like, well, whatever, dude, it hadn't happened yet. Look. Look at us. We're boiling the frog. The frog. You're talking about Vladimir Putin, right? Yeah. The guy that you accuse of being the most ruthless, insane assassin, killer, election rigor, murderer, coup d'etat, H bomb possessor in the world. That doesn't seem right to me. You know, and especially when. And this is the thing about Kamala Harris, right, is I just can't have someone that much dumber than me lecturing to me, you know, I'm sorry, Like Donald Trump, whatever. He knows some things about things I don't know, right? Like how to be a New York real estate tycoon or something, I guess. How to. How to lose money on a casino. I don't know. He could teach me some Things. But Kamala Harris. What. What does Kamala Harris know that I don't know other than a recipe for something or another? She doesn't know anything. And like that clip of her with Liz Cheney where she's trying to struggle through the lesson of Pearl harbor and.

Dave Smith (61:47)

Oh, my God.

Scott Horton (61:48)

And she's. She's attempting to essentially approximate, you know, repeating something she thought she heard someone else say somewhere else before maybe in a movie she saw one time or something. She doesn't know what to say. Not really. She's hoping as she's talking that it's going to kind of come to her and she's going to know what to say, and then she never can. So she has the most imperious, most condescending tone of voice. Look, let me tell you about the lessons of Pearl harbor, right? And then she goes, yeah, the lessons of Pearl harbor the people of Europe won't soon forget. Wait, wait. What? Like. Oh, just the whole thing of it, man. And then at the end, I couldn't even quote it with the built in pauses because she's got it, like, really stop and concentrate just to get from one word to the next. But she finally concludes. Sputters and just. Just gasping, crawling. Finally concludes that. And because we got into that war, we were able to win that war. And then. So that's the. And history is a thing, and we should never forget it. And so she couldn't even come up with the story, which. The story, Kamala, is that the lesson of Pearl harbor and World War II is that we can never come home again. That they woke up the sleeping giant. And the sleeping giant got so wise defeating Tojo and Hitler that the sleeping giant learned he can never afford to take a nap again or the world will spin out of control. And so that is why America must dominate Asia and the Middle east and Europe forever is because if we don't, someone else will and things will be worse than when we're in charge. Can't you just say that, you dumb bitch? But she. No, she can't. The best she can do is that the lesson of Pearl harbor is that we beat Japan. That's it. That's all. And then. But that's why I got to stay at war. She goes, let's. We got to look at this recent history, Dave, by which I mean we got to go back 80 years and not talk about anything that happened since then. We've done nothing but fight wars and lose wars the whole time. The only victory that any president can name for the last 80 years was George. George H.W. bush's victory in Panama and I guess Reagan and Grenada, if you want to count that. But don't say Iraq War One. We're still bombing Iraq 33 years later from the consequences of that first war. It never stopped. We've been bombing them the whole time. The only time we stopped was for two years in 2012 and 13.

Dave Smith (64:29)

No, you're right. I mean, look, even, even Kosovo, Milosevic was still in power afterward. We've had successful color coded revolutions where we were able to like overthrow. We've had successful regime changes, but in.

Scott Horton (64:46)

Terms of like, actually they all led to wars too. Terrible wars. Yeah, yeah.

Dave Smith (64:50)

And like any of them that you could say, like, I mean, like again, like, if you're narrowly defining winning a war is like overthrowing the regiment team, then I guess. But every single time, like even, okay, we overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, but then the country's a failed state afterward and there's open air slave markets. It's hard for any reasonable person that's kind of hard to spin as a win. And like, if you stay, you know, if you have to stick around like occupying the country for almost two decades afterward, like, okay, we overthrew Saddam, but it's pretty hard, hard to call that a win. And yeah, it is. You know, I remember by the way.

Scott Horton (65:28)

Those slave markets are still open. If anybody thought they're like, oh, when Barack Obama reopened the chattel slave markets in Libya, that somebody like took care of that, right? No, they didn't. That's 13 years of the reintroduction of slavery to North Africa due to the Democrats, the usa.

Dave Smith (65:44)

Yeah, yeah. And there's, there really is. It's like kind of as you, as you look through all of it. I remember Pat Buchanan wrote once, I can't remember when, which book this was in, but it was just a, it was like a simple way that he put it. But he was like, he was like, no matter how uninformed DC Thinks the American people are, you can't, you can't pull the wool over their eyes that their country can no longer win its wars, control its border, balance its budgets. Like he went through like a budget like, like the most basic roles of government. And there's something very interesting from like the libertarian perspective to me about government, which is the biggest, most powerful government in the history of the world that routinely fails at what all of the most basic services of government. Like what you, the thing that the normie American thinks like, well, the reason we need a government is like I don't know. Someone's gotta build the roads or run the border or prosecute wars or whatever it's like. And every single one of them, the government's an abject failure.

Scott Horton (66:51)

Yeah. 30,000 people a year die on the roads, man. You'd be on the freeway on some high embankment and there's no rail. Like, somebody has died here before, like, I'm sure they have. You know what I mean? Like what? No private company could get away with taking that kind of risk with or. Or the subway in New York City. That guy's on trial right now for providing security on the subway. How come he had to provide security for people in the subway? Wasn't that supposed to be somebody's job or, you know. Yeah, no, I'm with you. And look, and Kamala Harris, man, at least Trump is a protest vote in his way. And I'm not a fool. I don't see him as Ron Paul. I don't even see him as Rand Paul. He's Rudy Giuliani to me. But at least not just the Democrats, but the regime hates him and wants him out of there. At least he says things that encourage right wingers to hate war. And that is the most valuable thing that he's ever done in his life really, is normalize this thinking more and better than Ron Paul and Tucker Carlson could ever do. Is Donald Trump telling people, man, you're a chump if you believe in these wars. Stupid, right? And like, man, that'll cure you. If you're a right winger, then like, boy, we don't believe in this anymore. I guess. So now he can get him to turn on dime if he wants to bomb Iran, they'll jump in joy for that, you know, kill Soleimani or bomb Syria or whatever. Then all of a sudden they'll find an exception for him. But at least overall, he's norma. That kind of America first discourse that is hugely important. And quite frankly, like, you know, I think the. Honestly, the worst threat of Kamala Harris, other than the war in Ukraine, is the censorship regime. Yeah, because it's already so far out of control. Look how bad it was under Trump, under his nose when he couldn't stop his own regime from doing it to him while he was even the president. But imagine, and I think Biden is just too out of it. Kamala Harris at least can like put in a seven or eight hour day or six or seven hour day or something and like, yeah, be worse. I think she could be worse, especially on the censorship stuff. And once you Listen, why these liberals talk, man. You know, once they know that they're fighting the good fight against disinformation from the people who are trying to sow discord and disrupt our society or whatever, then, like, they don't think they're evil, man. They don't think they're like, oh, no, this is a war against the sacred, most precious right of free speech, and I'm going to cause a war, and I better shut the hell up. And like, no, they're like, oh, I just want to go get a job working for Michael McFall, censoring people. And there's so much of it, and it really could be like, you know, remember, I'm pretty sure. Who's that horrible Zionist lady? Bari Weiss. Wasn't it her that said that? That. Yeah, you know. No, I'm sorry. Maybe this is the New York Times. No, it wasn't Barry Wise. It was the New York Times that said that. Yeah. You know, podcasts are the last. Oh, you know who it was? It was that. Oh, she writes for the Washington Post. Taylor Lorenz. Oh, yeah.

Dave Smith (69:59)

The worst.

Scott Horton (70:00)

Yeah, yeah. She says her. Her expert that she was interviewing or whatever said that, yes, podcasts remain unfettered. You know, fetters are leg shackles, you know, just like, oh, no, podcasts are the last place where a dude can talk to a dude without a liberal FBI agent lady shadow banning him for it. And we can't have that. And of course, boy, on YouTube, the algorithm's insane. It's so censored, it's out of control. But, like, as far as I know, the algorithms on Spotify and Apple and these kinds of the basic ways that people get their podcasts, their audio podcasts, are essentially unfettered, still substack. You know, they don't censor their people based on, you know, pressure campaigns and this kind of thing. But remember how Twitter was before Musk bought it? When you're, like, living in the bowels of npr, lady, you know, view watcher hell. And those are the sensors. Remember Elon Musk when they all let. They had, like, the pictures of the employees and who was left after Elon Musk bought the thing and it was all the white girls had left and where do they go? Who were they? They were the ones in charge of making sure that no one can hear what you say, and they were the ones that got fired. No, it's not perfect over there. There is still some censorship on Twitter, but, man, it was just an absolute hell. It was like having Kamala Harris herself decide who's allowed to tweet what on there? And I'm terrified of the second coming of that, man. I mean, and not just because it sucks for us to get censored, but, but because I fear how people react to being censored. You know, I interviewed a CIA counterterrorism analyst lady one time about the protest movement in Syria, I guess, and different stuff. And she told me that the CIA's framework for how groups become terrorist groups and all that, Muhammad ain't on there, has nothing to do with Islam whatsoever. What it is, is it's when protesters are silenced, they turn violent. That's what people do when you take away their last ability to complain about things is they get really upset, man. What do you expect them to do? So here she was saying in context, she was saying, when all these protests broke out in Syria, Bashar al Assad should have said, good, good protest. That's cool, man. I'm listening. And even when a few cops got killed, he should have still tried to play it very cool until he just couldn't anymore, at least, because, boy, once you clamp down, it's on.

Dave Smith (72:31)

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Scott Horton (74:20)

And so this is what happens.

Dave Smith (74:22)

There was a lady, same same with Yanukovych in, in Ukraine. I mean, no question, obviously it was a U. S backed coup, but he played right into their hands by cracking down on the protesters and then just drew even more people to the protests. A huge mistake.

Scott Horton (74:35)

Yeah, and there was some lady, I can't remember, I think she was like an Iranian expat. She was probably towing the regime's line. But what, she, she had said something that got her censored. I could have that backstory wrong. But anyway, she was a lady who was a YouTuber, a YouTube podcast video political lady and I believe involved in Middle east politics stuff. And they censored her channel. You know, maybe she accidentally said COVID 19 or something. And so they just deleted her channel right off the YouTube. And of course it's just like Neil Postman technopoly. There's not even a person to complain to now you gotta argue with a robot about whether you're allowed to be on YouTube anymore. And this kind of. And so she didn't get anywhere with her appeals. And so she took a gun to YouTube headquarters. And I forget if she killed anyone or she tried to think she's like shot people. And it was like, that's just a taste, man. That's what happens. You know, that's not me threatening anyone. That's like a warning of what happens when you have a censorship regime. And think about in America, man, you've seen the south park where they go, what we'll do is we'll have war all the time, but we'll let them have free speech so they could cry about it. And then as like a pressure valve, right, so that they don't get too upset and stop us, they'll at least be allowed to complain, right? Like look at it from their point of view. You take away people's ability complain, they're going to freak out and maybe shoot you. You know, like that's how people are. And this is a society lousy with firearms, man. You know, you can be like bugs Bunny and just reach off screen and grab a gun from anywhere in America.

Dave Smith (76:13)

Yeah, well. And look, I mean, I think that while everybody does like to get excited over the big show that is the presidential election, the truth is that this threat is going to be with us going forward even if Donald Trump wins the presidency. And in fact, it's one of my concerns about so on, on one hand, I am very much rooting for Donald Trump to win. I think that it's my, my feeling. So I was, I argued briefly with Robby Suave and Michael Tracy. Both took issue with something I said that like, it was, I said something along the lines of like, the most exciting thing about Donald Trump getting reelected is that it could really be a death blow for the corporate media and that they've, they've been taken hits, but this really could be the end. And I was like, look, I mean, these guys, for him to be elected again after the entire corporate media, you know, did. Threw everything they did at him, including, you know, the latest rounds since he's been out, you know, democracy is on the ballot. He incited an insurrection. He's still kind of a Russian spy, I think. I don't think they've ever really retracted that. And he's a Nazi and all of this stuff. It's not just that he gets elected again, but it's that the narrative just writes itself that Joe Rogan won him the White House, that Kamala Harris refused to go on. He was willing to do it it, and that's the biggest show in the world, and that's what put him up there. I haven't checked the numbers recently. It was over 30 million just on YouTube last I saw. It's got to be in the tens of millions on Spotify and then all the clips and other channels and everything. I mean, it's just going to be enormous numbers. Now, both of them made the same counterpoint to me, which is a reasonable counterpoint, which is that they said, well, look, Donald Trump was actually good for their ratings last time he was in my feeling, my hunch, I suppose, is that I don't think they're going to be able to recreate that. And I don't think that. I think the Russia Gate insanity is what drove so much of those, those ratings. And I just don't see after the Russiagate thing falling apart, after the COVID thing falling apart, after Sharp is Attack and She's Joy and all of these things. I just, I think it's going to be very hard, hard for them to recreate Any of that. I, again, I could be wrong about this. That's why. Yeah, I mean, it was all just so ridiculous. But I do think the COVID one being the biggest one. I mean, it's so much bigger even than the war in Iraq or any of that. Because at the end of the day, most Americans, they didn't fight the war in Iraq. They really had nothing to do with that. And sure, there are people in the country who either served or know someone who served. And I'm not like, downplaying that, but, but the numbers, like, if you just run the equation, even though, like tens of thousands of soldiers who killed themselves after those wars, that's still tens of thousands in a country of hundreds of millions. It's just. But COVID policy affected hundreds of millions of Americans, you know, and for them to have gotten that all completely wrong. And a lot of people know that. I'm not saying everyone knows it, but a lot of people know because it was like, exposed in front of them in real time. It was just.

Scott Horton (79:26)

Do you think it's going to be a blowout?

Dave Smith (79:28)

No. The election. No, I don't. I don't.

Scott Horton (79:31)

You know, I mean, the Democrats just, just on the COVID alone, the Democrats deserve to pay. And Trump absolutely played his part in that. But especially in hindsight, it's so clear that it was the Democrat governors locked their states down the most as part of a destabilization campaign against Donald Trump. Trump, right. That was why they locked the people of their own states, the citizens of their own states down in the United States of America was just because they thought ultimately it's going to redound on him worse than them. And hey, if they got to lose a few governors, fine. It's still worth it to get rid of the president. And, and, and so they should all be in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives for that. And that is why they did it. I already know they're guilty of it. We'll find the paperwork later. But we all know it wasn't a coincidence. Why it was the Democrats all worse in the year, in the election year, 2020, on the COVID lockdowns. Dude, that's not 100% at all.

Dave Smith (80:28)

100%, I think. All right, so this is how I tend to feel about it. As you mentioned earlier, there was around election, the election of 2020, and if you could picture, this is November of 2020. And there was a real pitch that the Biden campaign had that I think resonated with a lot of Americans, which essentially was A return to normalcy. And if you could put yourself in November of 2020, you know, it's not just the insanity of the media and how crazy Trump was and that there was always some new scandal and there's.

Scott Horton (81:08)

Riots on the street.

Dave Smith (81:09)

Yeah, there's riots, there's lockdowns, there's. It's like, what the hell is going on? And it, it was at least plausible for the establishment to say, look, Trump brought all this chaos with him. And how about this guy who's been in the Senate for 700 years, who everybody knows is just basically Joe Washington, D.C. let's just get back to normal United States of America stuff. And oh, by the way, the reason he is in his basement this whole time and you're not hearing from him is because he's being responsible. I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic. It would be irresponsible, super spreader events. This was still the narrative at the time. In November, believe it or not, in November of 2020, that has evaporated because we got rid of Donald Trump and we didn't go back to normal. We continued the new normal, as they called it. So I think now with, I think it's a much tougher sell. And if I look, everything, this isn't scientific, what I'm saying here, but everything, forget like the polls or the media or any of the betting markets even, or any of the projections, everything that I can see, touch, feel, you know what I mean? Like, everything that I can observe with my senses tells me Donald Trump's got this locked up. I mean, look, Donald Trump. This was one of the, the more interesting things that got completely underreported about Donna, Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden night, was that there were no protests.

Scott Horton (82:40)

There was that two guys out front, right? Yeah.

Dave Smith (82:44)

Pierce Morgan was at the event and he told me the next day, he said, you know, this is hearsay, but he said that he talked to a Secret Service agent who said he asked if there were any protests. And he goes, Max, 100 people at max. There was like 100 people out there who were protesting this thing. And that in itself is like, that's so radically different than 2016. I mean, 2016, Donald Trump has an event at Madison Square Garden. There's a real security concern about that, man. You would have seen people hit with bike locks outside and all types of brouhahas between proud boys and antifa and all this, it's just not there anymore. And so now, now while all of this is happening and while I'm watching it on tv. And you go, okay, so Donald Trump's final pitch in the last minute of the fourth quarter was, I'm gonna go on the Joe Rogan podcast and do great and make Joe Rogan love me. And we're laughing together. We do a three hour conversation, and then I'm gonna headline Madison Square Garden in deep blue Manhattan. And the corporate media and the Democrats, they're. Their final sale in the campaign was like, huddle up, guys. And they go, okay, I. I say we call him a Nazi again.

Scott Horton (83:58)

Yeah.

Dave Smith (83:59)

And they went, okay, let's go with that. Like that seems.

Scott Horton (84:02)

And they totally dropped that, right? They. That was Biden's thing. And then when it became Harris, they said, no, we're doing joy and vibes.

Dave Smith (84:09)

And what does that mean?

Scott Horton (84:10)

Beyonce's songs or something, I don't know. But then that's not working. And then, so what do we do? Nazi.

Dave Smith (84:17)

Well, and that's all they got. It was so David Sacks, who I think is really great, I really like that guy a lot. But he. I heard him say this, and I think he was the first one who called it. I think he got it completely right, is that he basically said, so when. When Kamala Harris was at her height right after she was subbed in for Biden, what he said was, he goes, look, she's getting a bump in the polls now off an enormous sigh of relief, right? Democratic voters, that they're just like, they're watching this, you know, dementia patient, and they're like, oh, my God, we have to sit here and make excuses for them. And then all of a sudden, okay, that's got. You don't have to do that anymore. And they kind of breathed a giant sigh of relief. And then, hey, we can project the whole thing onto her. Yeah, no, she's not the awful candidate we were talking about five minutes ago. She's joy and hope and all these.

Scott Horton (85:08)

Things and demographic boxes checked, right?

Dave Smith (85:11)

Exactly. A historic thing, which liberals love. Liberals love to add a little historic thing to their campaigns. What he said back then was that he goes, look, if she isn't able to maintain this, and if the polls start tightening again, she's going to enter the death spiral, which is kind of the Hillary Clinton death spiral. You know, when people go like, well, how come you didn't do more events in Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton? That's why you lost the election. It's like, yeah, because her numbers go down every time she does events in Wisconsin.

Scott Horton (85:41)

That's right.

Dave Smith (85:42)

There's a real problem. You have here. And he, he called this a few months ago because she's going to enter the death spiral where. Oh, you're, you're losing ground in the polls. Better go do an interview. Hey, you're losing more ground in the polls now because of that interview. Better go do a couple more interviews. Oh, shit. You're. And it's like every, it's the same thing as after the debate.

Scott Horton (86:01)

Like your bit about Biden in your standup where you were like, well, well, I guess we'll just put him out there again and go double or nothing on black because what other choice do we have? Put it back out there. Hope for the best.

Dave Smith (86:12)

Dude, it was a great, it was a great joke that lasted for three weeks. Unfortunately, there's just no.

Scott Horton (86:16)

You tell the same joke about her.

Dave Smith (86:18)

Yeah, I got to just switch it to her. Yeah, but there is. So this is what. And the thing is like with Biden, right there was the dynamic shifted. So the thing is that Joe Biden was always going to stumble and, and say the wrong words, but now there was a microscope on them and now the corporate media wasn't going to pretend you, like the senile conversation was a right wing fringe talking point. And so it was like death. And it's. Anyway, I say all of this to say that everything I see around me tells me Donald Trump's got this thing in the bag. But then you look at the polls, and I'm not one of these people who are like, oh, the polls are all lying. I don't think that's exactly right. I actually think they do a decent enough job. They're usually within the margin of error. Not always. But you look at the polls and you're in a. I mean, look, Donald Trump is doing. Donald Trump always performs better than he polls and he's polling better than he was in either of the last two presidential elections. But it's still really goddamn close.

Scott Horton (87:21)

But, you know, I was talking, by.

Dave Smith (87:22)

The way, I would not be surprised if Donald Trump ends up winning. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if by 10pm we know Donald Trump has been reelected. But I'm also, It's also one of these things. It's kind of like a jury where you're like, okay, listen, the longer the jury's out, the worse it is for Donald Trump. Like, if we don't have results by the end of Tuesday and we're going into Wednesday not having them, and we're going into Thursday not having them, Kamala Harris is going to end up winning that. Like, if it's if it's the thing where it's got to go into, like, you know, you know, it wasn't Pennsylvanian.

Scott Horton (87:53)

That shot him, so Pennsylvania kind of owes him one, you know what I mean? I don't know. Yeah, no, you're right, man. Listen, I saw. Who's that guy, Kyle, who's. He's kind of a leftist, but we like him. I think he's married to crystal ball, right? Kyle Kalinskenski. So I saw a clip of him where he said, hey, check it out, man. Brand new you gov. Pollution sample size 48,000, neck and neck. Donald Trump stuck, he says, at 47%. Hard ceiling on 47. Can't seem to crank it up any higher than that. And on the biggest sample size of any poll going around, and usually a thousand will get you within 3 or 4 percentage points, but here they're going for tens of thousands of surveyors. And I think the qualification was likely voters. I think it was registered voters. Trump is ahead, but likely voters, it's Harris by two or something like that.

Dave Smith (88:54)

Yeah.

Scott Horton (88:55)

And like, I don't know, man, you.

Dave Smith (88:57)

Know, it's tough to make predictions on it.

Scott Horton (89:00)

Remember four years ago I said Donald Trump rigged this election against himself because someone had told him that mail in ballots help Democrats. So he decided to go on a demonization campaign against mail in ballots, even though he didn't have a solution. He was the one who signed the CARES act that like, did all a lot of this stuff, and he had no way to stop the states from doing it the way that they were doing it. They're not in his chain of command whatsoever. So he made a terrible mistake to just try to be a bully and say, like, you know, you're stupid if you vote by mail or what? Like what? And he did that. He kept that up all summer long. And the contrast was made, especially plane, when he was in Florida. And I think this was even on camera. I don't know, maybe I just read about it, but Desantis kind of elbowed him and said, man, don't say that. No, I did. I did just read about this. But he said, don't say that, man. We win by mail in Florida. And so Trump goes, oh, no. Mail in ballots are terrible and horrible and they'll turn you gay. Except in Florida. They're great in Florida. But what was he telling the rest of Republican voters in America? He was telling them, listen, if you're not willing to show up and vote for me in person on election day, forget you. Don't even bother. But Republicans skew old and old people skew afraid of the germ. And those are the people who probably want to vote by mail. And probably people who live in more rural areas who have a harder time getting to the polls are also people who are going to probably be Trump voters. So wouldn't you want to say, hey, Jimmy, make sure your cousin Carl gets his ballot and mails it in? Well, it's all those non voters out there, all those wrestling fans, all those potential Trump people who aren't going to show up on election day because that's not been their habit in their life, but they might vote for Trump if they could. Now, what's the opposite of that? The opposite of that would be him, him doing everything he can to encourage Republicans to vote by mail. All this last summer long and leading up to right now, has he been doing that? No. And I've seen a couple places where he's like kind of torn on it and goes, no, you should vote for by mail. Voting by mail is okay too, and whatever. But this should be a massive push. They're like, hey, you whose friends and family are pro Trump, make sure they vote. The ballot is at their house right now. They don't have to do anything except put a stamp on this thing. It's fact. He's probably even return to return mail stamp on it already. Right. Like, so that would be if he was smart and not a bully. If he was positive, he would just go, okay, the Democrats have an advantage by mail. We're going to shrink that advantage. We're going to do everything we can.

Dave Smith (91:50)

You know, I've said on the show before, it was like you would think if he was concerned in 2020, this is about the voting by mail. Like, this would be a conversation like with his like chief of staff and attorney general and like a couple other people in his cabinet when it starts by going, listen, I think this vote by mail thing is ripe for fraud. And so here's the plan. But instead he just said the first part publicly at every single stump speech without a here's the plan. It was just, hey, this is going to be fraud.

Scott Horton (92:24)

Yep. And there probably was.

Dave Smith (92:26)

Yeah. Like, yeah, I'm sure. But listen, I do, I do have to, to wrap up here. Of course, next time I have Jan, which will be soon. We'll be, we'll be promoting the, the release of the book. But I'll let you go. Any, any final thoughts next. Next time I talk to you, we'll be, we'll be talking all about provoked. And we'll also probably know who the next President of the United States and. But final word and, and also just let people know where they can find your stuff.

Scott Horton (92:52)

Sure. Okay. Well, final word. I don't know what the hell is going to happen, man. I don't know what's going to happen on election night and I don't know what's going to happen if he wins and I don't know what's going to happen if she wins. And it's going to be the. The Carlin in me is excited to see the coming chaos. Yeah, you know, I'm. I'm afraid to make a prediction. I guess the force is telling me that it's going to be a blowout. Dude, that she's just pathetic. There's no way. He's the most famous man in the world and she is just sun. Dumb, dumb hoe. Like, you gotta be kidding me. And he again. Boy, he's got problems, but still he's a superstar dude. Yeah, he's like Michael Jackson. He's bigger than Michael Jackson. You can't beat that with just some dumb hoe. Some absolute idiot who has nothing to say about anything because she's never been curious or care about anything in her life. It just can't be, dude. I. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. But also, you know, I'm gonna be doing a live stream competing with you and Patrick David, I guess I'm gonna have. Keith Knight and Connor Freeman are coming into town from Arizona and we're going to be doing a live stream from here at Libertarian Institute HQ here on. On Tuesday night. So that should be fun. So people could just, I guess probably tune into the blog over there@libertarian institute.org or check out our YouTube channel and. And then yes, all my stuff go to Scott Horton.org right now. You can pre order the book. This is the most important thing. You pre order provoked@provoked book.com or just Scott Horton.org provoked. We'll take you there. And we're taking pre orders now. And that means that I swear to God that this thing is going to be done and in your mailbox by Thanksgiving. So you beat.

Dave Smith (94:34)

You beat Christmas. That's what, that's what matters. You can give it. This is the Christmas gift to give to somebody who you love.

Scott Horton (94:40)

That's right. This is gonna be the Tickle me Elmo of 2024. Dude. All the bros are going to be reading provoked.

Dave Smith (94:47)

All right, well, Scott, you're the man. Thank you so much for taking the time. And we'll talk soon, after the election, and it'll be fun to. To watch all this craziness unfold. All right, thanks, everybody, for listening. Catch next time.

Scott Horton (94:59)

Peace.